Wording of Schelter note



Jaime Villate writes:
> On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 10:16 -0500, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>> e.g.:
>>
>> Maxima is the open-source release of Macsyma, the legendary computer
>> algebra system developed in 1967-1982 at the Massachusetts Institute
>> of Technology.  The original Macsyma inspired many other systems,
>> including the commercial Maple and Mathematica, and they retain a
>> strong family resemblance. Maxima is the only publicly-available
>> Macsyma descendent with an active user community, which continues to
>> maintain and extend it. 
>>
>>
>> Maxima was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until his death in
>> 2001. In 1998, he obtained permission to release the source code under
>> the GNU General Public License (GPL). We thank him for his work, which
>> made the survival of Maxima possible.
>>
>>
>> Comments?
> 
> I like your proposed text better than the current one; however,
> there are two things in your proposal that I'd like to reword:
> 
> "Maxima is the open-source..."   --> Maxima is the free software...
> 
> "the commercial Maple and Mathematica"  --> the proprietary Maple and
> Mathematica
> 

Yes, this rewording is quite important.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware

-- 
      Vadim V. Zhytnikov

       <vvzhy at mail.ru>
      <vvzhy at netorn.ru>